News and links for late August 2012

27 Aug 2012 — Adrian Morgan

Herewith another link collection and general update. This one’s a little out of schedule (given that I aim to post these things near the 7th and 21st of each month), but sometimes it’s a battle to keep my queue of to-read links from growing a lot faster than I can read them….

There’s a little personal news at the end, including one 3D photo.

I heard about the death of Neil Armstrong from my alarm clock radio. It’s unusual that my alarm clock radio tells me something I care about; normally I look upon radio as merely an inoffensive noise to get me out of bed. But this was an exception. I linked to an interview with Armstrong back in May, but never got around to listening to more than the first two episodes. Should do that.

I take claims of plate tectonics on Mars with a grain of salt. It’s quite an extraordinary claim, given that people have looked for plate tectonics on Mars before and concluded that there isn’t any. Still, worth watching.

Another Mars mission has been announced, which will focus on studying the interior of Mars as opposed to its surface, and should settle that plate tectonics question. This is cool and all, but so soon after Curiosity I would preferred to give some other planetary body a turn.

The model butcher shops are indeed impressive, and were I to obtain a few to distribute as gifts, I would surely have no difficulty finding people to appreciate them. With current image formats it is not possible to reach into the photographs and inspect them, but the possibilities would be unlimited if you could.